SDRuno Basics for 1st time Users (VID587)

hi this is steve from sdr play in today's video we're going to go through the very basics of downloading installing and running sdr uno this video is very much geared to the first time user you may have just acquired your rsp and this will walk you through the process of downloading the software how to connect up your rsp and how to verify that everything is working correctly so again very much the basics to make it easier for you to navigate through this video we've broken it down into seven short sections you can see the relative timing for each shown on this slide so if you want to come back and refer to a particular section just use the scrub bar in youtube to take you to the time that you need for the section you're looking for so the first step will be to download the software and all the software you need is available from our website at sdrp.com so let me walk you through that process and we'll take you to the website navigation to the software download page and download the software for you to use to make it even easier we've implemented what we call the start here flow and once you go to the website look for the green start here button and it will walk you through the remaining steps once you get to the sdr play home page there are a number of ways to get into the start here flow of course you could just type in the url that's listed on the quick start guide that came with your rsp but it's probably a little easier if we just click around so we can go up to the um top of the screen where it says software downloads and you see there's a link there for start here and it's also duplicated under the uh the help menu and that will take you straight to start here or of course since you know that you've gone to the website needing software which is why you're there you can click on the neat software button whichever way you choose to go you will then get to the software home page and you'll see the start here green button in the upper right corner so what we can do is simply click on that and that will take us into the start here flow we then get to the start here home page with a bit of introductory comments and telling you why exactly we're asking you to go through the registration process and then again click on the start here button to continue and the next thing will be asked is to input our name and email address so i will put in my name and an email address it will ask which country uh you purchased your rsp and the location and a lot in the us purchase through hro it asks you for which is your device type and i'm just going to use a dx for demonstration purposes here and operating system and i'll say windows 10. this is actually good information for us to help troubleshoot any technical issues you may have down the road the information is confidential we don't sell it to anybody we don't use it to spam you with email but we do insist on registration if you want to avail yourself of our tech support so first off we go to the left where it says select serial number prefix and drop that down and then we select the first four digits of our serial number from that list and for this rsp1a it's 1804 028 795 once we've entered that submit and continue now we get to choose which software we wish to use we will pick sdr uno because that's the preferred choice and here we see a choice of various things the api other supported software is not necessary if we download the basic sdr uno package it includes everything we need all in one download so all we need to do is collect click on select uh it will then tell us a little bit about the latest version we click on download and we'll see a little message at the bottom of the screen and in just a few seconds we'll get a message that the software has been downloaded and it will then be scanned for viruses and now we have the option to open file one thing you have to manage before running the software is make sure that you can connect your rsp to your pc your pc needs to have at least a usb 2.0 port and if you look at the back of your rsp device you'll find it has a whoops what they call a usb type b connector on the back of it and you'll need a suitable cable to connect the two together this is a very standard cable used on many printers and scanners uh it turned out i had many of them just sitting in my junk box that i was able to use successfully now there is a bit of a myth flying around that you need a special usb cable for it to work um a lot of people will tell you you need a cable that has ferrite cores on it as you will notice mine does not um and while there is some truth to the fact that if you're in a situation where noise is induced into the usb cable and gets into your rsb you may be able to eliminate some of that interference by having ferrite cores but in general it is not a requirement and certainly it is not a requirement to have ferrite cores on the cable for the rsp to be recognized by the sdr uno software so you might forego any added expense and just try using a cable that you have lying around and then subsequently if you determine that you do have locally induced interference then you might want to try a cable with ferrite cores okay so previously we downloaded the software and it was sitting there waiting for us and depending on what you've done since then either that file is available on the screen to be clicked on to run or you may need to navigate into your downloads folder and run the file from there let's walk you through that in detail but at this point do not plug in your rsp but we can now open the file we downloaded in the previous step at this point we just follow the prompts that show up on the screen so we will allow changes you'll see various messages come through select the button that says i accept the agreement and move on i always use the default settings here and we will go for the full installation that will give us the latest uh plugins available from both sdr play and from the community at large and you may find those very useful to play with later on so next let it make a shortcut for you and on the desktop confirm all that stuff and just let the thing cook for the api we're asked again to accept the agreement so having confirmed that we have not plugged in an rsp yet we can continue again accepting the defaults in my case i had a previous install so we'll allow it to go in there and now install it wants to close the api service again because i have a previous install you probably will not see this the first time you download the software it's now installing the hardware driver okay now at last we're allowed to plug in our rsp and just wait a few seconds for it to install you should hear the windows chimes for for when a usb device is plugged in and that will be an indication that it has been installed and then we can click on next one more time accept the agreement for the plugins i don't have dab here but if you have dab in your region you may want to make sure you read those instructions although you can pull them up for review later on again allowing it to install all the plugins you can check them out if you don't like them you can uninstall them no reason not to install all of them at this point and at that point the installation is complete there's just one more thing we need to do before we're ready to get this up and running and that is connect some sort of antenna to our rsp now there is a myth out there that you need a special antenna to use with an sdr in fact nothing could be further from the truth and uh if you're a practicing ham already then whatever antennas you already have will be perfectly usable and uh if you're an hf operator you probably um have a bunch of antenna connectors with pl259s on the end so the only thing you'll need in that case is some sort of adapter and uh hopefully you can see here's one here i use which goes from uh sma mail on one end which connects to the rsp and on the other end it has an so239 which will mate with your pl259 connectors in fact if you look at the illustration on this slide you can get them also as a short pigtail which has the added advantage of being a bit of a stress relief and avoids uh dragging down the rsb if the antenna cable falls off the table also and so on the other thing is if you don't have any antenna for the purposes of evaluation you don't need anything fancy at all and i'm quite partial to this blue wire antenna that i take with me when i'm traveling it's quite simply a length of wire i found in the junk box and it has a banana plug on one end and a simple uh crocodile clip on the other it's hard to see with this background and a crocodile clip on the other to provide mechanical support and the um the nice thing is the banana plug on this end fits perfectly inside the the so239 connector on my adapter like so uh for a more detailed discussion of antennas i refer you to a video that my colleague john hudson recently prepared you can see the uh the url on the screen there or you can just go search for it by uh go to sdrplay.com and type antennas in the search box or look through john's recent blog posts so having done that let's uh let's fire this thing up and get it running another popular misconception about sdrs in general and sdr uno i guess in particular is that there is a magic group of settings that you need for any given situation uh the fact of the matter is sdr uno does give you access to a large number of settings but those settings are for optimizing reception not for acquiring reception in the first place and what i want to do is i just want to show you some of the key settings you need that will generate signals from your rsp that you can see and hear these are the only settings you really need to have set up correctly to be able to see a spectrum and a waterfall display starting on the left if applicable select the correct input the one to which you've connected your antenna if you have an rsp1a there's only one input so those boxes do not appear secondly turn the gain slider all the way up to the top and only reduce it if you see an adc overload message appear in the main window next select the correct mode am fm upper sideband lower sideband etc and then select the correct frequency please note that the frequency is always displayed in hertz so make sure that you have enough zero shown it's quite a common mistake for someone to have dialed up seven kilohertz thinking that they're tuning to seven megahertz for example one way to avoid that difficulty is to use the band select buttons on the right which will correctly tune the frequency range that you're looking for and at the same time set the correct mode for you and finally never forget to press the play button in the main window to start the thing running now let's see how this works in practice now we have an antenna connected to our rsp and the rsp is plugged into our computer we can start the software for the first time and we can do that quite simply from the shortcut that appears on the desktop now it's worth noting that even though sdr ono has a great number of available settings you by no means need all of them to verify that the thing is working correctly and start receiving signals depending on your screen resolution you may have multiple windows open up even more than this but the key ones we need are the main window the rx control window which mimics the front panel of a typical transceiver and the main spectrum window the auxiliary spectrum window will also pop up and is useful as a zoomed in view of what's happening in the main window in my case it's also opened up the memory panel which we don't need right now so i'm going to close it remembering the key parameters that we just discussed i'm using an rspdx which has multiple inputs so i need to make sure that i've selected antenna a which is the antenna port to which i connected the blue wire antenna so having done that we now turn the gain up to maximum and we click on play and there's no signals there and i'm going to mute the radio and by default the radio starts up at 3.5 megahertz and i'd like to point out that uh all frequencies displayed in uno whether here in rx control or down in the main spectrum window or in hertz so 35000 is 3.5 megahertz that is 35 kilohertz it is not 35 megahertz just so you're clear so one of the ways that you can guarantee you enter the frequency correctly is by use of the band select buttons over here so since we're just verifying it we're going to use the local broadcast signals because they're nice and strong and i'm going to hit medium wave and what that will give us is a spectrum of the am broadcast band here in north america and if i click on this signal here which should be krld at 1080 unmuted to reverse mortgages so you'll see that there is the spectrum for you and uh it correctly selected the mode which was one of the other things we wanted to uh um set to get signals out of it so now for example let's go to the fm broadcast band and i'm gonna go take us directly to 100 megahertz and the quick and easy way to do that is to uh left click on the frequency display and i can type 100 and then the letter m which will take me directly to 100 megahertz and here you see an fm station down here with the hd radio sidebands um now for fm broadcast we need to select fm it's a broadcast station so we need stereo wide fm and the filter bandwidth 192k so having done that we should be able to hear a local radio station and uh as i mentioned you see a close-up view of the selected bandwidth which is the dark area on the screen appears between the red lines in the uh auxiliary sp window up here now we're not exactly on frequency and uh an easy way to fine tune is to use the mouse wheel which will tune you around the dial so 99.5 is where i think we want to be for this station so we can uh use the mouse wheel over a selected digit to get exactly on frequency and there you have it those are the only settings you need to make to tune into different stations if you want to try the hand bands if you've got a better antenna than i have here simply select one of the handbanks i'm going to mute the signal um with my bluewire antenna i'm not going to pick anything up but i do want to illustrate that if i hit 20 meters for example uh it will frame the band for me from 14 to 14.3 megahertz again notice the frequency is displayed in hertz so four one four one seven five zero zero zero is fourteen point one seven five megahertz and uh because i use the band select button it has automatically selected upper sideband for me which saves a little bit of time so if i now go to 40 meters now my tuning range has been changed to 7 to 7.3 megahertz and the mode has been changed to lsb so very quick and easy way to verify that uh your radio is working is put a very basic antenna on there and tuned to the local broadcast bands if i had this hooked up to my hf antenna i would be pulling in stations on the hf bands right now and uh one thing you might want to refer to is from the options button in the main window you have the choice to open up the user manual it was installed automatically when you installed sdr uno and you'll probably want to refer to that frequently as you get used to all the features that sdr owner has to offer as i mentioned there are many many capabilities within sdr uno and feel free to experiment if something bad happens when you change a setting then unchange that setting if the uh if the uh something bad that happens causes it to stop working don't worry there's a get out of jail free card if you click on the options button again there is a reset to default settings and that will get you back to where you started from no matter what you played with so look at the user manual reset if you get into trouble and go back to sdrplay.com and visit that applications and support catalog there's additional tutorials there on getting the most out of sdr uno using it to make a pan adapter with your existing rig using it with third-party software for digital decoding you name it there is a ton of information available for you there online so far we've downloaded and played with sdr uno but what if you want to try out some additional software well the good news is we've got it all set up for you it's very easy to do it just takes another trip back to sdrp.com and you can try different sdr packages different types of add-on software and uh above all you don't have to register again so that makes it even easier let me know walk you through how you will do that this time when we go to the sdr play website we can bypass the start here and registration system altogether and to get the additional software we can either go to the navigation bar at the top and select software and downloads or we can go to the quick link button here on the right neat software for your rsp so if we click on that it takes us to the software home page which is the same as the one you saw before but this time instead of clicking on start here we can just go down select our rsp model i'll say an rsp1a and our operating system and we will be taken directly into uh the downloads section and then the software that's presented to you will be tailored towards your choices of both the rsp you have and the operating system you're using so for example if you've been using sdr ono but you want to check out some of the third-party packages you have a choice of cubic sdr sdr console and hd sdr and you're welcome to download those and try them and then use whichever one suits you best there's other software available that's fun to play with spectrum analyzer is a great tool for evaluating performance of any filters you may have made the new radio if you want to build your own radio that's primarily a linux thing but can be run on windows also there's also a section for plugins uh you installed all the basic plugins when you installed sdr uno but occasionally the community plug-in installer will be updated with the latest third-party plugins so you may want to visit for that adsb these are transponders on aircraft at 1.09 gigahertz it's a lot of fun to track those uh transponders and plot them on a map you can download software for that you can download the tcp server for remote operation and you can also download the extio plug-ins which are used for other types of software that require a plug-in to operate particular models of the rsp hardware so there's lots of stuff here you can play with and you're more than welcome to come in and download the software and play with it as an example let's look at the sdr uno plugins and uh here's the sdr uno plugin installer these are for the official plugins from uh sdr play in addition there's the community plugin installer and those are for plugins developed by third parties and they're both available for download so if you see an announcement that an updated version of the community installer is available go to this page and download it if for some reason you want to go back in time to legacy software that will also be shown as applicable on this page on the lower portion of the page in general you won't be needing that but if you want it it's there so what do you do if it still doesn't work you followed all the steps i've showed you in the videos and there still seems to be a problem well don't worry help is a hand and again going to our website at sdrplay.com there's a couple of ways that you can find the help you need to get yourself up and running you can look in our applications and support catalog there are other how-to videos in there uh you can specifically um input what type of problems you're having and get suggested solutions and if that doesn't work you can open up a support ticket so now let me walk you through how you would do that returning once more to the sdr play.com website you'll not be surprised to find there are at least two ways to get to the help section again there is a an item up a top on the navigation bar and also there is a quick link button on the right hand side that we can click to get us into the help system and help is broken down depending on the type of help you're looking for is is it tech help you need are you looking for help in deciding which rsp you're interested in if you're new again there's the green star here button if you're checking on your order status you can do that if you already have a help ticket running you can check on your status there one thing you can do is just browse our applications and support catalog that's also available uh via a direct link at the top here applications and support and what that will do is it brings up a list of various videos and documents that are available it's divided into various categories but you can also search so if for example you're setting up a pan adapter you can type in pan adapter and uh we can search all categories and uh here you see some of the videos and documents that are available telling you how to set up a pan adapter a very powerful search tool um perhaps you have a more general help question regarding uh setting up sdr uno or something like that so we can go into the tech help and again it's it's broken down into hardware and software issues some of the most frequent support questions appear on the right uh let's let's pick uh software again the help system will work based on the particular model and operating system you're using and you can even select which particular software you're using so for example going to the software page what happens if it says no device is and you will see some advice here some specific advice for windows 10 and windows 7 links to documents from the video catalog the help system is designed to be somewhat intelligent and based on your input as to what the problems are it will try and pull videos and other documentation out of the applications and support catalog to help answer your questions if for some reason after reviewing this material you still have issues find the still need help button at the bottom click on that and you will be sent into the ticket system and you can put in descriptions of what the problem is uh most of the information uh about your particular setup will be auto populated when you told us that when you logged into the help system give as much description as you can and a picture's worth a thousand words so if possible get a screenshot add that to the help ticket and we will be able to respond to you typically well within 24 hours so lots of help resources there and do not hesitate to contact us if you have any issues

Channel: SDRplay Software Defined Radio Receiver

Views: 103,214

Keywords: SDRplay, RSP

Id: k8p106BpSXU

Length: 29min 37sec (1777 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 02 2021